


put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile

by rillrill



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Drunk Sex, First Time, Gilligan's Island metaphors, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 13:42:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4022023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he has feelings for Richard, so be it. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that’s worth bringing up. Just because Jared thinks he feels it, doesn’t mean it’s valid. He learned that a long time ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile

**Author's Note:**

> I was just gonna write a nice bit of nervous kissing from poor Jared's POV but them my scumbag brain was like "Write porn, dummy!" and here we are, I guess. I'm all id right now and I can't stay away from these cinnamon rolls in love. 
> 
> References to Jared's tragic backstory are very vague but... present, I guess? Title is from the National's "Baby, We'll Be Fine."

Jared doesn’t think about the past.  
  
He doesn’t dwell on it, because it isn’t productive. Which is not to say that he’s locked it away entirely. He tried therapy. It did its job. And then the rising tide of his schedule and workload at Hooli made it impossible to really hold down a set weekly appointment, so he stopped going, but he thinks it worked. He got through what he needed to get through. It did its job so that he could do his.  
  
He reads self-help books. When he’s having a bad day, he sometimes browses the self-help section at the Palo Alto Barnes & Noble, skimming through books he’s already read so that he doesn’t have to look at the sections he’s highlighted and underlined and the margin notes he’s left in neat cursive in his own copies. In those moments, familiar words are made fresh, and he feels like he’s getting somewhere. And it helps. So there’s that, too.  
  
Mostly, though, he works. He dedicates himself to his job, to making things run as smoothly at Hooli as he possibly can. And when he finds Pied Piper, he also finds what he thinks might be his calling, to help steer this ship through the choppy waters of biz dev. He’s not the captain and he’d never claim to be, but he’s more like— _well_.  
  
When he was a kid, he used to watch TV Land when he got the chance to watch TV at all, and Gilligan’s Island was on a lot because Gilligan’s Island is always on TV Land, it’s the only show TV Land has ever played, as far as he knows. And he slowly began to find an odd kind of comfort in a show that he knew was inherently ridiculous, which is why he still thinks of any group of people in terms of the Gilligan’s Island archetypes. He assumes he’s not the Skipper. That’s probably Richard. And Erlich is probably Gilligan, despite the fact that their physicalities would indicate the other way around. He guesses Gilfoyle and Dinesh might be the Howells, if only because they’re always together and arguing like an old married couple, and also Gilfoyle can be a bit of a bigot. The Professor – it would have been Peter Gregory, he supposes, but now that’s all up in the air. Monica is obviously Ginger, with her nice hair and demeanor and all. Which, Jared thinks, would leave him as Mary Ann.  
  
Which is not exactly a confidence booster. Even on a good day, well, he’s still Mary Ann.  
  
It doesn’t matter, though. He doesn’t even think about Gilligan’s Island anymore most of the time. It’s just a thing that flits through his mind on occasion, the way he’s heard some women categorize their friends as Sex and the City archetypes. He just does the same thing with Gilligan’s Island. Although, to be fair, nowhere in the episodes he remembers watching did Mary Ann have to do any amount of soul-searching about possibly-slash-probably having feelings with the Skipper.  
  
The Skipper meaning Richard, and Mary Ann meaning him. For clarity’s sake.  
  
It’s a mess. He doesn’t like messes. But it’s fine. He doesn’t dwell on it. It won’t amount to anything, and the miniscule off-chance that it would isn’t worth the risk. If he has feelings for Richard, so be it. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that’s worth bringing up. Just because Jared thinks he feels it, doesn’t mean it’s valid. He learned that a long time ago.

  
  
The problem is that every so often, he gets the feeling he might not be alone. That there might be something else there, that it’s not just him. But those moments are so fleeting, because that’s just Richard’s nature. He’s tentative and skittish and sometimes Jared feels as though he’s dealing with a feral cat, one who isn’t nasty, just afraid of everything. But there are still moments.  
  
They nearly kiss once. He’s pretty sure of it. In the car, after a board meeting, Richard almost kisses him, and that’s the moment where everything clicks and he thinks it might not be all in his head. But he doesn’t act on it for months. He locks it away, keeps it upstairs, files it in the evidence box inside his head marked “Richard Hendricks” and does nothing else.  
  
Nothing else of note really happens for a while. There are moments, soft touches, little glances that he thinks might have meaning, and they get closer and closer but nothing changes. He thinks it might be for the better. Change isn’t necessarily a good thing, and what they have already works.

  
  
  
So Pied Piper turns one year old, officially, and they have a little party. Nothing extravagant, because Jared is monitoring the budget pretty strictly and they don’t have the funds to waste on a big blow-out. It’s just the staff and a couple board members who drop by, leaving almost as soon as they’ve shown up, Laurie Bream practically speed-walking backwards out of the place as soon as she’s said her terse, customary hello and goodbye. The party whittles down to just the core few of them by an hour in, and it’s comfortable and lived-in. Carla and Gilfoyle get into an argument about IPAs that devolves into multiple uses of slang terms for female genitalia that Jared considers himself too much of a gentleman to use, but otherwise the whole thing goes off smoothly.  
  
He’s forgotten to eat, which is a problem he often encounters; his hunger signals are strange and don’t really work. Some sort of learned response. He has to remind himself to eat most of the time. It doesn’t occur to him to have more than coffee and a yogurt and a handful of pretzels until it’s eleven o’clock and he’s had two beers and is already feeling very drunk. So that’s a problem, which he is going to fix. He’s going to fix it _right now_.  
  
In the kitchen, he opens a bag of granola and takes out a handful, because that seems like a good idea. He’s munching on toasted-coconut clusters when Richard walks in and gives him a strange look.  
  
“I forgot to eat,” Jared volunteers. “So I thought I should probably eat. Something.”  
  
“That’s Erlich’s granola,” Richard shrugs. “Eat at your own risk, I guess.”  
  
Jared laughs a little. He knows it’s rude, and yet. “You think he’ll notice it’s missing?”  
  
“Remember the Greek yogurt meltdown?”  
  
“Oh,” says Jared. “Good point.” He pours the granola back in the bag and carefully closes the seal, taking care to position it just as he found it on the pantry shelf. He’s giggling a little at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, and Richard is laughing with him, and slowly the laughter goes from being about the granola to being about nothing in particular, nervous and bubbling with tentative mutual interest, the way you laugh around someone you’re afraid to say the wrong thing to.  
  
From out in the living room they hear Dinesh shouting about The Matrix and Richard rolls his eyes. “You want to know something?” he asks, conspiratorially, like they’re partners in crime. “I hated that movie.”  
  
“Me too,” confesses Jared. “I didn’t want to say anything, because I know how seriously this house takes the Matrix debate, but—”  
  
“I thought it was overrated then and I still think it’s overrated now,” Richard says, finishing his sentence, and God, it’s incredible how he can just _do_ that. He laughs again, nervously, and Jared smiles with him, and Richard stuffs his hands in his sweatshirt pockets and looks away.  
  
There’s a brief moment between them, a beat where no one says anything, and suddenly Richard turns on his heel and walks out, and Jared is left alone, spinning, wondering what he did wrong.  
  
In a split second, he makes a decision. He takes a chance. He follows Richard.  
  
He knocks on his bedroom door tentatively, unsure. “Richard?” There’s no answer for a few seconds, and then he hears a muffled “Yeah?”  
  
“May I come in?”  
  
Another muffled “Yeah,” and so he turns the doorknob and slides sideways into the room, trying to move through as little space as possible. Richard’s lying up on his bed, staring at the ceiling.  
  
“Are you all right?” Jared asks, carefully, hovering near the bed. He’s still feeling drunk, and the granola seemed to do absolutely nothing for him. “Can I sit down? Or, no, is that too much to ask? I still don’t know how you’re feeling, are you okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” Richard says again. “Yeah. I’m – I’m fine, you can come up, it’s okay.”  
  
Jared clumsily manages to clamber up onto the loft bed, ending up on all fours near Richard's feet, his head ducked just below the ceiling. “You just ran out of there. I wasn’t sure – are you feeling nauseous? Would you like a Sierra Mist?” He doesn’t know why he says Sierra Mist. Everyone knows it’s ginger ale, or 7-Up in a pinch, and anyway, nobody ever thinks about Sierra Mist unless they’re at a restaurant that doesn’t serve Sprite.  
  
“I’m okay,” says Richard. “I just – I was just feeling overwhelmed. The party. It’s been a year and all.”  
  
“It’s been a good year,” says Jared.  
  
Richard closes his eyes slowly and exhales a long, deep breath. “I guess,” he says after a bit. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I feel like everything is constantly up in the air from week to week and I feel like we’ve barely moved forward and we’re losing our momentum constantly even if it seems, on a day-to-day level, like we’re getting things done. Like we’re really just running in place trying to keep up.”  
  
“I know,” Jared says. “It’s like a treadmill or something. It’s Sisyphean.”  
  
“Yeah,” Richard replies, in a voice so small it’s barely audible. Jared sighs and closes his eyes, and without really realizing what he’s doing, he carefully folds himself onto the bed beside Richard, laying down more around him than beside him. Richard shifts himself slightly to accommodate him.  
  
They’re close. It doesn’t really register how close they are at first. Jared feels glazed and unfocused as he stares at the ceiling, at the unlit light fixture and the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan. A lamp down on a table below them is casting a glow up onto the ceiling and throwing the textured stucco into sharp relief. “Caravaggio,” he says out loud, without realizing it.  
  
“What?” Richard’s voice is quiet, and Jared feels his cheeks flush, the heat going to the back of his neck before he answers.  
  
“The ceiling,” he says, without further explanation.  
  
“Oh.” He can tell Richard doesn’t really understand the internal logic jump but he doesn’t explain. There’s a small moment of dense quiet between them, and Jared becomes aware of exactly how close their bodies are, far too close for the size of the mattress, there could be at least a few more inches between them, but he doesn’t move.  
  
Richard’s foot knocks against his calf. “I get it now,” he says. “The light.”  
  
“Yeah,” says Jared. “I can’t remember the actual term. Just the painter. And The Calling of St. Matthew. I remember that, for some reason. Just not the style.”  
  
“Thanks, Vassar,” snorts Richard, and Jared laughs along with him. His arm is resting against Richard’s, their hands back to back on the bed, and for a moment all he can focus on is the body heat they’re sharing, but he doesn’t jerk his arm away as soon as he becomes aware of it, because it’s nice. It feels safe. He doesn’t want it to change, which is why he distracts himself from it, before he can force himself to change it.  
  
“I’m glad I found this place,” he says, changing the subject abruptly. “I know what you were saying before, about it feeling like a waste of time. But I’m glad I work here. It just makes me feel like I have – I don’t know, a purpose. Like I’m less of a cog in a machine. I know that sounds self-important but it’s true. I’m glad I found you.”  
  
The words come out before he can stop himself again, and God, he really needs to eat more, he’s on a roll tonight, saying things he normally wouldn’t or shouldn’t. Richard is silent but he doesn’t move his hand, and it’s only when Jared chances a glance from his peripheral vision that he sees Richard looking back at him, and then Richard slowly, carefully, finally moves his hand, turns it over and lays it on top of Jared’s, tracing his thumb over the softest part of the skin on the back of Jared’s hand. It’s a barely noticeable movement, microscopic to the naked eye, really, but Jared suddenly can’t concentrate on anything else, and it’s because of this distraction that he finally allows himself to ask the question he’s been wanting to ask for months, now, really.  
  
“Can I kiss you?”  
  
“Please,” Richard says quietly.  
  
For a moment, they don’t move, and Jared’s praying that he won’t chicken out and lose his boldness this time, but then Richard surprises him, turns onto his side and props himself up on one elbow and then leans down and closes the gap, capturing Jared’s lips with a soft noise that frankly, he’s not sure who it came from. His stomach is doing cartwheels as their noses brush and Jared pulls away, exhaling against Richard’s cheek.  
  
“Was that—” he starts to ask, before Richard kisses him again.  
  
The thing is, he knows this is stupid. He knows that this means everything is going to change, the whole dynamic of the company and the staff, and furthermore, this means paperwork. He’ll have to report this to HR. Which is complicated, because he _is_ HR. It’s so stupid and it’s so, so carelessly un-thought-through, and he would cease it immediately if Richard wasn’t kissing him like “Take My Breath Away” should be playing in the background.  
  
He thinks Mary Ann and the Skipper might have made a better couple in the end after all.  
  
For a moment, Jared doesn’t think, and he isn’t pretending. He pulls Richard on top of him, cups his face in both hands, and kisses back, normally stiff posture loosened and liquid, feeling whatever hesitation he might have had before dissipate as he nips mindlessly at Richard’s lower lip, prompting a little _oh_ and a soft, tentative grind downward.  
  
The party is still probably going on outside the door. Everyone is probably wondering where they are, if they’re sober enough to remember.  
  
A more rational Jared would stop this entirely, but his rational side went to bed two hours ago, at a normal, sensible bedtime, and he doesn’t want to slow down, drink some water, go join his rational self in his own bed outside of this house, which he senses will not make it back to by the end of the night, anyway. He pushes his hips up to meet Richard’s, and wills himself not to think about consequences right now. Because it feels so safe here, and he feels so wanted and _needed_ , and it’s okay.  
  
Richard rocks his hips against his and cards his fingers through Jared’s hair and kissing him, all tongue and heat and eleven-and-a-half months of repressed whatever-it-is, and without thinking, without questioning or second-guessing, Jared moves a hand down to the fly of Richard’s jeans, pulling away long enough to ask, “Can I—?”  
  
“Mmf,” Richard says indelicately. Jared takes it as a yes, already achingly hard as he feels Richard’s dick pressing up against his. He just wants more of everything, just wants the contact, he’s as touch-starved as ever and Richard’s body heat and weight against him is like air to a drowning man.  
  
Richard’s left hand moves down between them to the front of Jared’s own khakis and Jared inhales sharply and gives in, gives up whatever lingering doubt might have given him the impulse to push Richard away and run for safety, because he’s spent too long imagining this, too many stupid, hung-up nights thinking about this moment right here. Which is happening. And it’s basically everything he imagined—  
  
They break apart long enough to shed as many of their clothes as they can in the shortest amount of time. Jared keeps his boxers on, for some reason that he can’t quite quantify to himself, but pulls Richard back down on top of him, craving the weight of his body again, the solid pressure and warmth. “I want you to feel good,” he murmurs, sucking Richard’s earlobe into his mouth and noting with pleasure the gasp and slight moan it produces. “Was that – was that good?”  
  
He’s not much for dirty talk, but he’s in this for the feedback – he’d leave behind a comment card after sexual encounters if it weren’t a social faux pas, because he craves nothing so much as knowing where to improve. Richard squeaks a little as Jared tongues his ear while reaching back down to wrap a hand around his cock, stroking and provoking a helpless little shudder. “S’good,” Richard says shakily, and he’s rocking down into Jared’s fist, breathing steadily as Jared, gauging his reaction quantitatively, decides to speed up.  
  
“I just want to make it good for you,” Jared whispers, just loud enough that Richard can hear him as he twists his hand. Richard is biting down on his lip hard enough to turn the skin pure white from pressure, rocking his hips down harder with every stroke.  
  
“It’s so good,” Richard says through gritted teeth, breathing shallow as his hips buck helplessly. “You’re so good, Jared—”  
  
The praise is rushing like blood to his head and Jared strokes him faster, watching in almost detached fascination, mesmerized as Richard writhes above him. He’s beautiful, he thinks, staring up at him, wide blue eyes dizzying in the low lamp light. “Fuck, Richard,” he breathes, “need to see you come, please—”  
  
Richard’s head falls forward, his mouth catching Jared’s in a slack, empty kiss as he spills into his hand. Jared strokes him through it until he breaks the kiss, closes his eyes, shuddering down on top of him bonelessly.  
  
“God,” Richard breathes. “Um. Yeah.”  
  
With obvious effort, he pushes himself up, kneeling over Jared’s body, looking down at him with teeth marks still visible on his lower lip. He looks like an angel, hairline pricked with sweat, and Jared wants to touch all of him, wants to take him in all at once. Richard straddles his thighs, maintaining eye contact, relatively bold in the way his gaze doesn’t waver. Except then Richard pulls his boxers down, glancing down as his dick springs free, and Jared shuts his eyes as the cool air, stirred by the softly turning ceiling fan, hits his head. And then Richard’s reaching for him, curling his fingers around it as he lets the weight settle in his hand for a moment, his grip firm but not too tight as he begins to stroke Jared slowly, biting down on his bottom lip in a kiss.  
  
All the times Jared had imagined Richard’s hands on him couldn’t come close to this. It feels like a fever dream, like some sort of alternate-universe reality situation, and Jared shivers as Richard’s hand moves faster.  
  
“God,” he murmurs against Richard’s mouth, inarticulate and mumbling. “You’re so beautiful—” He sees Richard’s face flush at this, sees his eyes widen, and that’s it, that’s what sends him over the edge too quickly, spilling hot and sticky with a broken gasp that Richard swallows with another kiss.  
  
They give it a moment. Jared regains his bearings slowly, feeling bleary and fuzzy-headed, and Richard is looking at him with sweet, sleepy eyes, wiping off his hand on the sheet. Jared slides his boxers back onto his hips and pulls Richard back down on top of him, lacing their fingers together as Richard lays his head between Jared’s head and shoulder, adjusting to press his face into his neck. Jared can turn his own head just far enough to press a soft kiss to Richard’s temple.  
  
Whatever they just did, whatever just happened, it can’t be taken back. They’ll have to deal with this and more forward in a professional capacity and handle it in whatever way they find necessary. Technically, they might have just broken the sexual harassment policy that Jared spent so long wording and re-wording, but he’s not sure who would count as the harasser and he doubts either of them feels particularly harassed.  
  
He’ll give himself until Monday to deal with this. He can probably get away with tabling it until the start of the work week. It’s Friday night. They have about forty-eight more hours to commit all the workplace policy violations they want.


End file.
